Overview

Financial inclusion is a simple idea: people and businesses can access secure, convenient and affordable payment and other financial services, and use them to meet everyday needs and long-term goals.

Simple, but not easy. Today, about half the adult world lives in the informal economy, dealing exclusively in cash. To be one of these estimated two billion people is to face financial barriers that make life risky, expensive and inefficient. Financial Inclusion helps put people on a path out of poverty, creates productive empowered citizens, fosters business opportunities and fuels economic growth.

Digital payments are an “on ramp” to financial inclusion — very often, they are the first formal financial product a person uses. Visa has spent the last 60 years connecting hundreds of millions of people and organisations to a global system that enables fast, safe and reliable financial transactions. With our reach, insights and technical capacity, Visa is well positioned to advance financial inclusion.

In 2015, Visa made a public commitment to provide payments accounts to another 500 million people who do not use banking services as part of the World Bank’s call for Universal Financial Access by 2020. We are excited to pursue this marvellous goal, and we know it is in reach!

Powering Financial Inclusion

Our products are improving lives and livelihoods around the world.

Sending + receiving money

In many parts of the world, getting money to another person is risky, expensive and inconvenient. Visa offers fast, efficient and reliable options for personal payments like sending money home or paying school tuition.

Visa’s mobile-network product mVisa is overcoming bank branch scarcity by helping people access money or initiate a transaction at any merchant with a Visa logo in Rwanda, Egypt, India and Kenya.

Visa’s mobile payment product mVisa is overcoming bank branch scarcity by helping people access and send money with any phone, on any mobile carrier, and pay at any merchant with the mVisa logo in India, Kenya and Rwanda.

Paying for everyday necessities

Visa digital products are making everyday life more secure and convenient for people around the world. Our products provide people with a better way to pay for necessities, such as food, clothing, medicine and transportation.

Visa works closely with partners to provide the right products for the situation. In the Philippines for example, it was prepaid cards to get emergency aid to hurricane victims; in Nigeria, savings accounts that go to women business owners. We are connecting self-help savings groups to banks in Uganda and creating secured credit cards for USA minority households.

Receiving government payments

Governments are using Visa prepaid products to pay wages, social subsidies and pensions — moving away from cash and in-kind support. In doing so, they are making payments more secure and efficient, building more transparent e-government and introducing people to formal financial services.

Visa is working with governments in Egypt and the Dominican Republic to deliver wages and social welfare support to more than eight million households with Visa prepaid cards.

Creating convenience

When neighbourhood stores and other small businesses convert from cash to digital, they provide convenient, trusted places for people to learn about and use digital payments and deposits.

Through a partnership with the world’s largest bakery (Bimbo), Visa is upgrading 70,000 “mom and pop” corner stores in Mexico, allowing them to make and accept digital payments, including supply chain orders.

China Financial Inclusion Demonstration Zone

Partnering for Inclusion

Visa succeeds with our partners. We work with private companies, governments and non-profit organisations to reach undeserved communities worldwide and build solutions necessary for financial inclusion.

Private sector

Businesses are driving much of the innovation and investment that is advancing digital payments and making financial inclusion possible. Visa works with client banks and other financial institutions, technology innovators and retailers to develop, test and scale digital solutions that reach under-banked and underserved people and businesses.

We worked with Colombia’s coffee federation, Tarjeta Cafetera and Banco de Bogotá to launch a reloadable debit card so farmers can receive harvest payments and government subsidies without making long journeys to town. In India, we are helping Janalakshmi Financial Services transform loan disbursements from cash to Visa cards for its 5.5 million female customers, as well as providing financial and savings coaching.

Government

Governments are vital partners for advancing financial inclusion. They set national priorities and policies and directly reach large numbers of citizens and businesses through wages, social benefits and other payments.

Visa is supporting the Egyptian government’s agenda to convert its cash economy by delivering wages for nearly seven million government employees directly to Visa prepaid cards. Visa also developed an action plan to enhance digital delivery of the food and bread subsidy to 22 million households. In China, Visa is working with government sponsors to reach 10 million underserved people by 2020 through research, best practices, training and product innovation, including through a “Financial Inclusion Demonstration Zone” in three Northeast provinces.

Non-profit

Visa provides funding to leading non-profits, providing grants to develop programmes and share industry insights aimed at finding innovative ways to reach people who are excluded from the financial ecosystem. Some of our key partnerships are highlighted below.

Visa is a founding supporter of this partnership of governments, companies, and international organisations that accelerates the transition from cash to digital payments in order to help reduce poverty and drive inclusive growth.

Visa works with CARE to extend formal financial services to thousands of Africans and Southeast Asians who pool their money through self-organised Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs). Working within the VSLA framework, the partnership develops products and services that enhance security and expand access by connecting individuals and groups to banks and formal savings and loans.

For the 45 million people in USA who do not have a credit score, a secured credit card—a card backed by money in an account—can build credit history, promote savings and enable transactions. Visa worked with the Center for Financial Services Innovation to study why this tool is underused and identify strategies for getting it into the hands of people who can benefit from it.

We are learning from credit unions and community banks with largely minority customer bases about successful, local products that are closing the inclusion gap as part of a mult-iyear partnership with the Filene Research Institute. The “Product Incubator” programme is piloting five products at nearly 30 community financial institutions, with the goal of refining and then replicating them across the United States.

Visa has partnered with NetHope to promote and accelerate the reach of digital financial services (DFS) in India. Through this programme, NetHope will work with providers in India to design, test and deliver DFS to serve underbanked people.

Oxfam worked with Visa and a team of local merchants, microfinance institutions and mobile operators to build a platform for delivering monetary aid to those affected by typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in 2013. The project showed that distributing digital cash aid speeds disbursement, reduces costs and empowers disaster victims while helping merchants simplify their business. The goal now is to expand the practice of distributing digital cash versus in-kind donations when natural disaster strikes.

Visa is supporting efforts by the Universal Postal Union (UPU) to advance financial inclusion through a charitable grant to their new Financial Inclusion Technical Assistance Facility. With the goal of adding 250 million Post-held payment accounts by 2020, UPU will provide up to 20 Posts with expert advice and assistance to develop digital financial products and services, and improve capabilities. The Facility will also research new ways to bring individuals and small businesses into the financial system, and champion more postal action on inclusive digital financial services.

Visa partners with Women’s World Banking (WWB) to develop and deliver innovative financial services that close the persistent gender gap in financial inclusion. Currently Visa is supporting the roll out in Egypt of WWB’s highly successful micro-insurance for caregivers, as well as the local affiliate’s efforts to digitise its loan, repayments and insurance transactions. In 2013, with the support of Visa and WWB, Diamond Bank in Nigeria developed the “BETA savings” account to build on the popular services of local savings collectors while providing greater convenience, access, security and enhanced formal financial services.